Columbia College has officially banned electronic devices in all literature humanities and contemporary civilization courses.

Columbia University’s undergraduate liberal arts college will make the unprecedented move beginning this fall, according to a report from the Columbia Spectator.

“I think the ban is an opportunity to make it a place of greater intentionality,” said associate professor of Jewish and Israel studies, Clèmence Boulouque. “It might be a moment of ‘eat your veggies,’ and students might be disgruntled, but this is also what we think the humanities should set the standard for.”

The new policy comes as Columbia continues to study the impact of generative AI on college students, and although the institution’s music humanities department has had a device ban since 2025, this is a first-of-its-kind policy for the school’s flagship first- and second-year core curriculum (Core) classes.

Why Was the Prohibition Recommended?

In Spring 2026, Boulouque, alongside English and comparative literature professor Dennis Tenen, co-chaired a faculty working group that examined AI’s role in the core curriculum.

They recommended a ban after rounds of surveys with both students and faculty members.

“You can imagine valid pedagogical reasons to use technology in the classrooms, and we don’t want to prevent people from doing that,” said Tenen, referring to instructors who may require students to annotate a PDF as a group. “Obviously, instructors still have the freedom to use it in smart ways.”

Leveling The Playing Field

Although the device ban has yet to be announced publicly, a spokesperson for Columbia College said the policy is provisional for the 2026-27 academic year and was communicated to instructors, who were also given recommended language for their class syllabi before the start of the current fall semester.

“For many years, my syllabi have included a strong encouragement not to have laptops in class,” said Chloë Kitzinger, an associate professor of Slavic languages who teaches literature humanities. “I’m actually really glad to have this kind of coursewide policy now because I think it really does level the playing field.”

For now, Columbia College will continue to provide accommodations for students registered with the disability services office and plans to discuss the full scope of the AI working group’s recommendations with the faculty committee that governs the core curriculum.

Will Other Departments Adopt The New Policy?

According to Boulouque, it would be harder to get “Frontiers of Science,” along with other science-based classes, to support the technology ban. She also noted how computer use for art humanities students made sense when tools like zoom could help them to study works of art up close.

Undergraduate writing program director Nicole Wallack warns that this program is not a “one-size-fits-all set of principles for all of its sections and instructors” as the nature of writing and the course itself vary. She also said some may believe device-free classes are identical to being AI-resistant, which is not always the case.

Others believe they are definitely linked. 

Currently, Columbia offers faculty and staff free access to advanced models of Claude, ChatGPT, and Google Gemini, except for student access to Gemini within Google Docs, despite faculty concerns.

In August 2026, Columbia’s law school implemented a new policy allowing students to use AI as a “learning aid”; however, it prohibits using the technology for the content they submit.

“We all know that there are Columbia students who rely on AI for assignments. Is that the kind of people we want to be when we grow up?” said Richard John, a member of the working group on AI in the Core who teaches contemporary civilization. “Is that the kind of people that we want to interact with?”

He added, “Here’s a particularly egregious example: I have discussion posts, and I will ask questions in class. There are classes in which a student will actually look at an electronic device, punch in some letters, and get a discussion post answer. That’s very insulting to the instructor, and we heard quite a lot about that.”

At this time, Columbia joins the University of Chicago and the University of California – Berkeley as higher education institutions that have implemented some sort of technology ban for students.